New Histories for Old: Changing Perspectives on Canadian Native Past (review)

Ted Binnema and Susan Neylan have edited a useful collection of essays written in honour of Arthur J. ‘Skip’ Ray, a Canadian historical geographer and historian, who has made an outstanding contribution to the study of Aboriginal Canada. These original essays, contributed by colleagues and former students, review themes favoured in Aboriginal history by Ray himself, such as Aboriginal-European interaction, First Nation struggles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for land and resources, ‘Indian’ policy and treaties, the history of disease amongst the First Nations, and the writing of Aboriginal history itself.

The editors, both former graduate students of Ray’s, provide a very well-informed look at his career. His fresh approach in his first book, Indians in the Fur Trade (1974), truly changed the way people thought about the First Nations’ role in the trade. Instead of the passive players that previous historians had described, Ray saw the First Nations as shrewd and sophisticated partners vital to the exchange. Without question Arthur Ray was a path-breaker for the first wave of academic historians of Aboriginal Canada in the 1970s. The editors also emphasize how Ray became involved in the Aboriginal claims process, after he moved to British Columbia in 1981. In the years that followed, as well as keeping up his cutting-edge historical research, he participated as an expert witness in several landmark cases. As the editors point out, by the 1980s the interested observer became a participant in Aboriginal rights court cases.

The next five articles, written by academic colleagues in Aboriginal history, provide a wide-ranging look at several topics, all of which interest Ray. Historian Jennifer Brown’s essay about Cree and English naming around Hudson Bay reveals how European names were used to reinforce colonial claims. The Aboriginal history of Sault Ste. Marie in the nineteenth century, First Nation and Metis, is the subject of geographer Victor P. Lytwyn’s contribution. Most satisfactory is the sketch that J. R. Miller, a historian, provides of the evolution of treaty making in British North America and later Canada. He argues that treaties include more than just agreements over land, but also commercial pacts, and treaties of peace and friendship. Jody Decker, a geographer, looks at the impact of smallpox along the borderland of the Canadian and American prairies at the turn of the twentieth century.

Among the eleven articles in the collection, five, or roughly half, relate to British Columbia. None of these are big overview articles such as that by J.R. Miller on treaties; instead they focus on particular aspects of Aboriginal British Columbia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Daniel Marshall looks at the 1858 Fraser Gold Rush, and shows effectively how the gold rush place names reveal the extent of ethnic and racial diversity among the emigrants. The colonial authorities used many of these same names to designate First Nation reserves along the river in the late nineteenth century. Keith Carlson, another former graduate student of Ray’s, looks at Aboriginal struggles over fishing sites in the lower Fraser canyon. Another of Ray’s former students, Paige Raibman, looks at the expanding seasonal mobility of Aboriginal people on the Northwest Coast at the turn of the twentieth century. Former student and volume co-editor Susan Neylan examines the migration of the majority of the MelakatlaTsimshian First Nation to Alaska in the late nineteenth century. Ray’s colleague geographer, R.M. Gaulois, reviews the ‘uprising’ over land and resources by the Gitxsan people of the upper Skeena region in 1888. All five articles add to a fuller appreciation of the Aboriginal history of British Columbia, if at times the detail provided seems somewhat excessive.

At the end of the volume the summary essay by Cole Harris, a former student with Ray at the University of Wisconsin, and later a colleague at the University of British Columbia, provides an excellent overview of Ray’s important academic contributions. Harris also...